The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (story read aloud TXT) 📕

frosted grapes.

 

Her revenge, he felt—her lawful revenge—would be

to “draw” Mr. Jackson that evening on the Countess

Olenska; and, having publicly done his duty as a future

member of the Mingott clan, the young man had no

objection to hearing the lady discussed in private—except

that the subject was already beginning to bore him.

 

Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid

filet which the mournful butler had handed him with a

look as sceptical as his own, and had rejected the

mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He

looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that

he would probably finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.

 

Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up

at the candlelit Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens

hanging in dark frames on the dark walls.

 

“Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good

dinner, my dear Newland!” he said, his eyes on the

portrait of a plump full-chested young man in a stock

and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned

country-house behind him. “Well—well—well … I

wonder what he would have said to all these foreign

marriages!”

 

Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral

cuisine and Mr. Jackson continued with deliberation:

“No, she was NOT at the ball.”

 

“Ah—” Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that

implied: “She had that decency.”

 

“Perhaps the Beauforts don’t know her,” Janey

suggested, with her artless malice.

 

Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been

tasting invisible Madeira. “Mrs. Beaufort may not—but

Beaufort certainly does, for she was seen walking up

Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole of

New York.”

 

“Mercy—” moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving

the uselessness of trying to ascribe the actions of

foreigners to a sense of delicacy.

 

“I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in

the afternoon,” Janey speculated. “At the Opera I know

she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly plain and flat—

like a night-gown.”

 

“Janey!” said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed

and tried to look audacious.

 

“It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the

ball,” Mrs. Archer continued.

 

A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: “I

don’t think it was a question of taste with her. May

said she meant to go, and then decided that the dress in

question wasn’t smart enough.”

 

Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her

inference. “Poor Ellen,” she simply remarked; adding

compassionately: “We must always bear in mind what an

eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her. What

can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear

black satin at her coming-out ball?”

 

“Ah—don’t I remember her in it!” said Mr. Jackson;

adding: “Poor girl!” in the tone of one who, while

enjoying the memory, had fully understood at the time

what the sight portended.

 

“It’s odd,” Janey remarked, “that she should have

kept such an ugly name as Ellen. I should have changed

it to Elaine.” She glanced about the table to see the

effect of this.

 

Her brother laughed. “Why Elaine?”

 

“I don’t know; it sounds more—more Polish,” said

Janey, blushing.

 

“It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be

what she wishes,” said Mrs. Archer distantly.

 

“Why not?” broke in her son, growing suddenly

argumentative. “Why shouldn’t she be conspicuous if

she chooses? Why should she slink about as if it were

she who had disgraced herself? She’s `poor Ellen’

certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched

marriage; but I don’t see that that’s a reason for hiding

her head as if she were the culprit.”

 

“That, I suppose,” said Mr. Jackson, speculatively,

“is the line the Mingotts mean to take.”

 

The young man reddened. “I didn’t have to wait for

their cue, if that’s what you mean, sir. Madame Olenska

has had an unhappy life: that doesn’t make her an

outcast.”

 

“There are rumours,” began Mr. Jackson, glancing

at Janey.

 

“Oh, I know: the secretary,” the young man took

him up. “Nonsense, mother; Janey’s grownup. They

say, don’t they,” he went on, “that the secretary helped

her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept

her practically a prisoner? Well, what if he did? I hope

there isn’t a man among us who wouldn’t have done

the same in such a case.”

 

Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the

sad butler: “Perhaps … that sauce … just a little,

after all—”; then, having helped himself, he remarked:

“I’m told she’s looking for a house. She means to live

here.”

 

“I hear she means to get a divorce,” said Janey

boldly.

 

“I hope she will!” Archer exclaimed.

 

The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and

tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining-room. Mrs.

Archer raised her delicate eyebrows in the particular

curve that signified: “The butler—” and the young

man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing

such intimate matters in public, hastily branched off

into an account of his visit to old Mrs. Mingott.

 

After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs.

Archer and Janey trailed their long silk draperies up to

the drawing-room, where, while the gentlemen smoked

below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with an

engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood

work-table with a green silk bag under it, and stitched

at the two ends of a tapestry band of field-flowers

destined to adorn an “occasional” chair in the drawing-room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.

 

While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room,

Archer settled Mr. Jackson in an armchair near the fire

in the Gothic library and handed him a cigar. Mr.

Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit his

cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who

bought them), and stretching his thin old ankles to the

coals, said: “You say the secretary merely helped her to

get away, my dear fellow? Well, he was still helping her

a year later, then; for somebody met ‘em living at

Lausanne together.”

 

Newland reddened. “Living together? Well, why not?

Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t?

I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman

of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.”

 

He stopped and turned away angrily to light his

cigar. “Women ought to be free—as free as we are,” he

declared, making a discovery of which he was too

irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

 

Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the

coals and emitted a sardonic whistle.

 

“Well,” he said after a pause, “apparently Count

Olenski takes your view; for I never heard of his having

lifted a finger to get his wife back.”

 

VI.

 

That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself

away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully

to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual,

kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the

room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and

steel statuettes of “The Fencers” on the mantelpiece

and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked

singularly homelike and welcoming.

 

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes

rested on a large photograph of May Welland, which

the young girl had given him in the first days of their

romance, and which had now displaced all the other

portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he

looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay

innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s

custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the

social system he belonged to and believed in, the young

girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked

back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s

familiar features; and once more it was borne in on

him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had

been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

 

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old

settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously

through his mind. His own exclamation: “Women should

be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a

problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as

nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would

never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of

argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it

to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a

humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that

tied things together and bound people down to the old

pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part

of his betrothed’s cousin, conduct that, on his own

wife’s part, would justify him in calling down on her

all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the

dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn’t a

blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate

what his wife’s rights would be if he WERE. But Newland

Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case

and May’s, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross

and palpable. What could he and she really know of

each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow,

to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable

girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some

one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of

them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or

irritate each other? He reviewed his friends’ marriages—

the supposedly happy ones—and saw none that

answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender

comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation

with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture

presupposed, on her part, the experience, the

versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had

been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver

of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most

of the other marriages about him were: a dull association

of material and social interests held together by

ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who

had most completely realised this enviable ideal. As

became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife

so completely to his own convenience that, in the most

conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with

other men’s wives, she went about in smiling

unconsciousness, saying that “Lawrence was so frightfully

strict”; and had been known to blush indignantly, and

avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence

to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as became a “foreigner”

of doubtful origin) had what was known in

New York as “another establishment.”

 

Archer tried to console himself with the thought that

he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May

such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference

was after all one of intelligence and not of standards.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world,

where the real thing was never said or done or even

thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary

signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why

Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter’s

engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed

expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate

reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced,

quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of

advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage

bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents’ tent.

 

The result, of course, was that the young girl who

was the centre of this